pkgconf VS stage0

this may only be effecting fedora 39 users, but how i resolved it was by going to pkg config repo where then i checked out version 2.0. then i compiled, and installed pkg-config manually. double checked that the version was now 2.0 up from 1.9.5. then went back into the cardano node repo and packages were found successfully during compilation. not sure what is up with pkg-config not working on version 1.9.5 but i'm glad it's over, and hopefully this helps anyone else out suffering from the same thing. may the force be with you all.

pkgconf 1.9 seems to be only an unstable release series that will result in the stable 2.0. See NEWS

Incidentally, there is already a fork in the form of the pkgconf project: https://github.com/pkgconf/pkgconf

Is the author the same person that talks about Inclusivity, and then posts screencaps of other people they are having disagreements with to twitter, for their followers to sneer at? [1]

Is this the same person who uses the departure of a developer as a reason to "fix" a community [2], when the mailmap of one of their projects shows they are referring to their own faked departure? [3]

This stuff doesn't make the Alpine Linux project look good. I totally see that its very rude to attack a person like this, but i think its abusive behavior and needs to be called out.

[1] https://twitter.com/ariadneconill/status/1445586541040979971

[2] https://ariadne.space/2021/08/08/on-the-topic-of-community-m...

[3] https://github.com/pkgconf/pkgconf/blob/master/.mailmap

Somewhat tangential, but I'm curious how big the bootstrap seed for Nix is. That is, if you wanted to build the entire world, what's a minimum set of binaries you'd need?

Guix has put quite a bit of work into this, AFAIU, and it's getting close to being bootstrappable all the way from stage0 [0]. Curious if some group is also working on similar things for Nix.

[0]:https://github.com/oriansj/stage0

https://www.bootstrappable.org/ has some good info. Reading the source of https://github.com/oriansj/stage0 is also very enlightening. It's set its goal to be understandable by 70% of programmers.

Even if they aren't, people absolutely should be able to bootstrap new platforms from scratch. It's important to have confidence in our tools, in our ability to rebuild from scratch, and to be safe against the "trusting trust" attack among other things.

Lately I've been catching up on the state of the art in bootstrapping. Check out the live-bootstrap project. stage0 starts with a seed "compiler" of a couple hundred bytes that basically turns hex codes into bytes while stripping comments. A series of such text files per architecture work their way up to a full macro assembler, which is then used to write a mostly architecture-independent minimal C compiler, which then builds a larger compiler written in this subset of C. This then bootstraps a Scheme in which a full C compiler (mescc) is written, which then builds TinyCC, which then builds GCC 4, which works its way up to modern GCC for C++... It's a fascinating read:

https://github.com/oriansj/stage0

https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part...

Even if no one is "using" this it should still be a primary motivator for keeping C simple.

One countermeasure not mentioned here is bootstrapping a compiler with a program small enough to be manually verified. The stage0 project is under 1KB (small enough that the binary can be, and has been, manually checked against the hand written assembly), and GNU Guix (a system for reproducible, isolated builds) is currently working on moving it's bootstrap speed to stage0. That means that, fairly soon, there will be a large set of software that doesn't have a connection to an original C compiler.